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Sunday, March 5, 2017

Stars and Planets

My group just finished their stars and planets unit. I am teaching grade 4/5 in British Columbia and the new BC grade 4 curriculum now has some stars and planets including: 'Local changes caused by the Earth's axis, rotation, and orbit and the effects of the relative position of the Sun, Moon, and Earth'. To tackle these topics I taught my Stars and Planets unit which includes a variety of different lessons and activities about the stars, the moon, and the planets in our solar system and then I made sure to create lots of dialogue and discussion surrounding the topics from the New BC Curriculum that fit in with my unit quite nicely.

My students did a fabulous job with the moon homework assignment found in my Stars and Planets unit where students look for the moon in the night sky for 14 nights in a row and draw a diagram of what they see. We then used the website www.mooncalc.org to check for the phases of the moon, the height and position of the moon, the moon rising time, and the next special lunar events. We completed a few stars and planets art activities including an activity where students chose a constellation to re create using gold stickers and black construction paper. We also painted pictures of our solar system where Students used paint to create their art on white paper and once their paintings were dry students cut out their planets and glued them on blue paper. I handed out gold stickers to use for stars. I think this gave their art a nice sparkle!

My students really enjoyed the stars and planets scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt includes a poster for the sun and each planet in our solar system and a question sheet with 7 questions related to the stars and planets that students need to find the answers to on the posters provided. My group's 'star question cubes' were a success and my unit also includes a cutting and pasting the phases of the moon in the correct order activity which made teaching the phases of the moon easy. My group also came up with some very creative new planet names for the creative writing activity where they pretended to be an astronomer who just discovered a new planet. The Bingo game where students find classmates who can answer questions about the stars and planets was an excellent review and a fun activity which can be adapted for any unit!

My 79 page Stars and Planets Unit is jammed packed full of fun and creative activities that will make teaching and learning about space fun and easy. The unit is cross curricular as it includes reading, writing, and science activities. The activities are easy to make adaptations for all of your student's needs, and this unit also includes many interactive notebook activities. Which my students loved!